What Sherlock’s Text Messages Tell Us About Ourselves

Image credit: BBC

Nearly four years ago, “A Study in Pink,” the first episode of the BBC’s Sherlock, aired. And just five minutes into the episode, it became clear that the new series would be a new take not just on the Sherlock Holmes mythos, but on television drama as a whole. In the middle of a press conference where a beleaguered Inspector Lestrade was answering questions from reporters, the viewer heard a number of text message alerts—and then, as each reporter checked their phone, saw all their text messages appearing onscreen.

Since then, that technique—floating words representing text messages, Internet searches, or some other form of technological interface—has become a core element of the series’ identity. And while there are plenty of tech-savvy shows out there, it’s that technique that makes Sherlock so incisive: not only is it reflective of our practices, but more importantly, it says as much about us as it does about its characters.

Echoes of that first-season press conference scene abound in a similar scene from this season’s “The Empty Hearse”: Multiple Twitter hashtags flood the screen as word spreads that Holmes is far more alive than had been previously believed. “It was really as simple as [director] Paul McGuigan not wanting to do close ups of a whole load of phones whilst we read the texts,” producer Sue Vertue tells WIRED about the origins of the show’s visualization of social media and text messaging. (McGuigan directed four episodes of the series across its first two seasons, and developed the idea during preparation for “The Great Game,” which was actually shot before “A Study in Pink.”)

“Episode 1 was written and shot last, and so could make the best use of onscreen text as additional script and plot points, such as the text around the screen of the pink lady,” Vertue explains. “If you notice, ‘The Blind Banker’ doesn’t use [floating text] a great deal, as it had already been written, and the script didn’t lend itself so easily to the style in post-production.”

Overall, Vertue says, “the writers have genuine fun playing around with the text stuff now. I love the drunk, out-of-focus texts that we’ve used in ‘The Sign of Three’—it really adds to the richness of the storytelling, I think.”

That may be true, but as with so many aspects of Sherlock, there’s an element of misdirection going on here, with the fun, eye-catching slickness of the visualization distracting from a deeper commentary the show is making about its characters’ relationship with technology—and, by extension, our own relationship with it, as well.

“In a modern-day Sherlock Holmes series, we had to incorporate social media—it would seem weird and old fashioned not to,” Vertue says. Such an attitude is in keeping with the spirit of Holmes—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original incarnation of the hero was both modern and populist in his use of technology at time of publication, after all—but Sherlock takes the character’s reliance on props and outside elements to a new level.

Sherlock isn’t alone in that—Internet and cellphone usage abounds throughout the cast, especially as a shorthand for emotional connections (or the lack thereof). Whether it’s characters refusing to answer certain peoples’ calls, or Sherlock nagging Watson into submission via text onslaught, we all know what these things mean because we do them ourselves. The show is, unlike nearly everything else on television, reflecting our own reality back to us.

But that’s truly crystallized in Sherlock himself. The show repeatedly emphasizes that for all the man’s deductive prowess, he’s noticeably lacking in more basic areas of life. “The Great Game,” for example, made light of this by revealing that he didn’t know that the Earth revolved around the sun. At first that seems like an unforgivable contradiction, but consider of how ubiquitous web searching is on the show. This Sherlock doesn’t need to be an infallible repository of objective information; he has the Internet for that.

Yet, the fact that the show’s extends its visual text effect to Sherlock’s thought process tells us that Sherlock is himself a computer. Consider what Sherlock said when Watson was making fun of him for not knowing about the Earth revolving around the sun: “Listen. This [pointing to his head] is my hard drive and it only makes sense to put things in there that are useful.”

The crux of Sherlock has always been the ongoing question about how “human” Sherlock is, and how his relationship with John Watson has made him a more relatable, “better” man. But just as every season likes to reveal a mystery hidden in plain sight, it’s worth wondering: Is this a show that’s also been secretly pointing out the ways in which we’ve all outsourced parts of ourselves to our technology? Is Sherlock actually about how transhuman we’ve all become without even noticing?